[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[Stephen R. Blevins]

In a previous reply, there was reference to the BIOS not reading the 
disk geometry.  Even with GRUB, I found I *had* to allocate a separate 
/boot sector at the beginning of the drive to get around the 1024-th 
cylinder issue.  YMMV.

-- 
Stephen R. Blevins
stephen.r.blevins at gmail.com

------------
[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question
m-aaron-r aaron at pd.org
Sat May 22 14:05:56 EDT 2010

I'm trying to do a favor for a friend by installing Linux on an older
(but
serviceable) Compaq Celeron system of theirs that suffered death
by windisease.

As delivered the system would fail to boot, though the hard drive seemed
to be working fine when I pulled it and salvaged their user data by
hooking
the drive up as an external disk on my Linux desktop.  I've returned the
drive to their box and am now trying to install Linux on it using a
known
good Live CD copy of Ubuntu 9.10 (erase entire disk and install option).

The installation runs fine and the disk gets re-formatted and written
to without
reporting any errors. However, after install completion, the system
will not
boot to the hard drive, reporting something like:
"cannot find device #####-#######-######"
I ran the install a couple times using both 10.04 and 9.10;  10.04
provided
a GRUB shell prompt on one attempt.

I have since run a final test by swapping out the non-booting drive
with an
old 20gig spare and have successfully installed and booted the system,
so it's not the box it's the drive, and apparently only the "boot
sector" of the
drive that is the problem.

Is there a way so salvage this drive or re-allocate the failing boot
sector??

(I'm not keen on handing back a system with an HD of questionable
size, age and reliability, so I would prefer to salvage the 160 Gig
original
hard disk if it's possible to do so with some confidence.)

Suggestions appreciated!
peace
aaron